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Major Salon Marketing Crime – being too TIMID By salonhowto.com- Call Us Now On 618 9443 9327

Major Salon Marketing Crime – being too TIMID By salonhowto.com- Call Us Now On 618 9443 9327

There’s a couple of Big Mistakes almost all businesses make; being too timid, and its closely related cousin, being boring.

Most beauty industry marketing falls into one or both of these categories. And that’s because most owners of salons like to be seen as ‘nice’ people, who by their very nature don’t want to do anything to attract attention to themselves, let alone putting something out in the marketplace that might actually attract any sort of criticism.

Problem with that, of course, is that marketing is ABOUT getting attention, about standing out from the crowd, not blending into it.

So I was delighted to open my morning paper today to discover a story about a real estate agent who was really thinking outside the box. Now, the real estate industry is as guilty as the salon industry of wasting money on ‘me too’ advertising. You only need scan the real estate classifieds to confirm that. It’s a blur of sameness.

The problem for agent Andreas Geronimos was he was trying to flog an ordinary product (a plain two-bedroom apartment, in a very ordinary suburb) with the added burden of a tenant who’d stacked the place with books literally to the ceiling.

Andreas took a novel approach. Rather than trying to hide the disadvantages, he highlighted them, and had some fun with it. On a popular real estate website, he pasted the stars of Back to the Future over pictures of the property, added speech bubbles, and came up with the ad you see below.

Here’s what happened:

1) He got a story on page 2 of the morning daily newspaper, accompanied by the picture you see here.You cannot buy that kind of free publicity.

2) He says he got 2,700 hits on the ad – more than the entire suburb gets in a month.

3) he upset the people behind the website, who insisted he take down the ad.(As of writing this, it was still up: Here is the link.)

Point is this: Andreas might not be the best real estate agent on the planet. But that’s not the issue, the real issue is that it’s better to be different than it is to be good.

As he told me on the phone today, “the website people are upset because if I keep doing this, other agents might copy me and try to do the same kind of stuff, and they don’t want to have to police it!”

It’s a variation on the old problem of pretty, glossy magazines refusing advertising that doesn’t fit their pretty, glossy (but ineffective) guidelines.

My advice: do whatever you can to be different, even if…especially if… it upsets somebody.